The need to be able to contact and communicate with people while they are traveling has lead to the development of portable communications devices such as cellular telephones and pagers.
Most cellular telephones in use in the United States today enable a cellular telephone subscriber to place calls and to be called. This can be done while traveling throughout the range of the particular cellular system to which a cellular customer subscribes. Cellular phones of this type periodically send out radio signals to inform the cellular telephone system as to which cell the subscriber is in at any given moment in time. Because of the periodic transmission of location information, cellular phones of this type utilize a relatively large amount of power. For this reason, cellular phones routinely need their batteries to be replaced or recharged, sometimes after as little as a few hours of use. Thus, this known type of cellular phone suffers from power consumption requirements that frequently result in cellular phone customers keeping their cellular phones switched off for substantial periods of time during each day simply to conserve battery power. During such periods of time, the cellular phone customer can not be reached via the customer's cellular phone.
As an alternative to the above described type of cellular telephone, a type of cellular phone which is registered in a cellular system only when a call is made from the telephone has been suggested. This type of telephone, which is sometimes referred to as a "Telepoint " telephone, normally can only place calls and can not receive calls. Cellular phones of this type will be referred to herein explicitly as Telepoint cellular phones. References to cellular phones made herein which are not preceded by the word "Telepoint" are to be understood to be references to cellular telephones of the aforementioned type which are capable of receiving as well as initiating calls. In order to enhance the flexibility of Telepoint telephones, and attempt to overcome their inability to receive calls, the incorporation of a pager into a Telepoint cellular telephone has been suggested. U.S. Pat. No. 5,175,758 discusses one such system. In the system discussed therein, calls to a Telepoint cellular telephone are initiated by dialing the number of a pager incorporated into the Telepoint cellular telephone. Using the telephone number information incorporated into the pager message, the Telepoint cellular telephone can then respond to the page by initiating a telephone call. As a result of the telephone call, the Telepoint cellular telephone customer may be connected with the person attempting to call the Telepoint telephone subscriber, assuming of course, that the Telepoint cellular phone is turned on at the time the call to the pager number is initiated.
For various reasons, including ease of use, the aforementioned cellular telephones capable of receiving and placing calls, as opposed to the Telepoint cellular telephones which are usually limited to being able to place calls, have come into widespread use in the United States.
Unfortunately, present day cellular telephone service remains somewhat regional in nature, limiting the useful range of a cellular phone associated with a particular service provider. In addition, cellular phones designed to operate with one system may not operate with other systems. For example, cellular phones designed to operate in the United States will frequently be incompatible with cellular phone systems implemented outside the United States. This greatly limits the usefulness of cellular phones during periods of international travel. In many cases, cellular phone incompatibility precludes a cellular phone owner from registering the same cellular phone with different service providers across the country and/or throughout the world.
In addition to operational problems, cellular telephones commonly in use in the United States today confront their users with various, and often serious, privacy concerns. Since cellular telephones involve the use of radio broadcasts to transmit information, the information transmissions can be easily intercepted by third parties. The widespread problem of people listening in on cellular telephone conversations has resulted in suggestions that confidential business and/or personal information should not be discussed when a cellular telephone is being used. As discussed above, cellular telephones periodically provide the telephone company with information about the cellular telephone's location, and thus cellular telephone user's location. Presently, if an individual were to keep a cellular telephone that is turned on with them at all times, the telephone company would have information about the cellular telephone customer's location 24 hours a day. To many people, this location information represents an invasion of privacy which they would prefer to avoid.
In addition to cellular telephones, pagers present another way of contacting an individual while the individual is traveling. Pager's are well known one way communication devices which allow an individual to receive telephone numbers and/or text messages of relatively short duration via the use of radio transmissions. Because pagers only receive information and do not transmit data, e.g., location information, pagers generally require far less power to operate than cellular telephones. This generally allows pagers to operate for relatively long periods of time without having to recharge or replace their batteries. Because pagers normally only receive and display information, they tend to be more compact then cellular telephones. In addition, because the messages transmitted to pagers tend to be relatively short, and the transmission of such messages does not involve the expense of maintaining complex and costly mobile telephone switches, pager service generally tends to be far less expensive then cellular telephone service.
Various pagers currently in use today have the advantage of being compatible with some world wide paging services. The advent of world wide paging service allows a subscriber to such a system to be paged almost anywhere in the world without the need for the pager subscriber to be concerned about pager system compatibility.
Because pagers receive, but do not transmit information, the privacy concerns associated with cellular telephones generally do not exist in terms of pager use. That is, there are no communications from a pager subscriber to a pager system to be intercepted. In addition, the messages from the pager system to the subscriber tend not to include highly confidential information. Pager service also has the advantage that it does not involve the disclosure of a subscriber's location to the pager service.
In order to enhance the usefulness of pagers, the incorporation of operator controlled autodialers into pagers has been suggested to facilitate the dialing of telephone numbers included in pager messages. Reissue U.S. Pat. No. 33,437 describes one system wherein an autodialer and pager are incorporated into a cellular phone. Under control of the operator, the autodialer can be used to initiate calls, via the cellular telephone, to telephone numbers received as part of a pager message. The incorporation of a pager and autodialer into a cellular telephone allows the cellular phone user to selectively dial a telephone number received in a pager message, without having to manually enter, into the cellular phone, the full telephone number to be dialed.
Despite the incorporation of autodialers into pagers, and even the combination of a pager/autodialer/cellular phone such as the one described in Reissue Pat. No. 33,417, a major disadvantage of pagers is that a caller attempting to contact a person via a call to a pager must still normally wait for some action on the pager subscriber's part to initiate the return of a call.
In view of the above, it becomes apparent that known systems for contacting individuals who travel from location to location suffer may present problems relating to the cost of service, worldwide compatibility and the time involved in establishing an actual voice connection with a party. In addition to these many problems, cellular telephone communication systems suffer from the various privacy problems discussed above. The relatively high cost associated with cellular telephone service, as compared to land based telephone service, is also a disadvantage of current cellular phone systems.
Accordingly, there is a need for improved communications methods and apparatus capable of establishing a voice call between a calling party and a remote party. It is desirable that such methods and apparatus be capable of establishing a call connection without having to provide the calling party or the telephone company with prior information about the called party's location. In addition, it is desirable that calls be capable of being established without the use of cellular telephones and the privacy and cost problems associated therewith. It is also desirable that any new communication methods and apparatus be capable of providing call establishment capability over a wide regional area and at a reasonable cost.